Various methods of direct printing of images or graphic designs onto textiles and various other non-paper substrates exist. In the industrial setting, an article on which an image is to be printed, for example an item of apparel such as a t-shirt, is typically loaded and secured onto a pallet such that the print surface of the article is secured in place. Typical industrial printers are designed for processing and printing only a single image file at a time. Consequently, prior art pallets have been designed for printing on a single substrate (e.g., a single sheet of paper, foam, fabric, etc.) at a time. Industrial printers, however, typically allow for a large print area. For example, an industrial printer may be configured to print an image of a square meter or more. However, oftentimes the article of manufacture to be printed on is much smaller than the print area that the printer is capable of printing, and thus much of the total print time is spent in loading the article onto the printer pallet and subsequently removing it from the pallet after the printing is complete. It would therefore be desirable to load multiple smaller articles onto a pallet and have the printer print respective desired images onto each of the loaded articles of manufacture during the printing of a single print file in order to reduce the total amount of time spent in loading and unloading the articles of manufacture from the printer pallet.
One difficulty in simultaneously printing multiple articles of manufacture that fit within the print area that the printer is capable of printing is the complexity involved in precisely positioning the articles of manufacture such that the respective image printed on each of the respective articles of manufacture is accurately aligned on the articles of manufacture in the precise position on the article of manufacture that the image is supposed to appear. Any misalignment of an article of manufacture on the printer pallet results in misplacement of the image on the article of manufacture, and can also result in the application of ink on areas of the article of manufacture and/or pallet where ink should not be. Residual ink on the pallet due to ink overspray from misalignment of the articles of manufacture can result in the transfer of ink or ink dust to subsequent items placed on the pallet.
Another reason that multiple items are typically not simultaneously printed is the complexity of instructing the printer exactly where to print each image on each article of manufacture on the pallet. As previously mentioned, printers generally print one image file at a time. Thus, to print multiple items simultaneously, each respective image to be printed onto each respective article of manufacture must be combined into one large combination image file, which can then be sent to the printer for simultaneous printing on the items loaded on the pallet. Building the combination image file, however, is not an easy task, as it involves both knowledge of the precise position of each article of manufacture on the pallet and the precise position of the printable area of each article of manufacture to be loaded onto the pallet, and knowledge of the mapping of pixels in the combination image file to the physical points on the pallet.
Yet a further complication in having the printer print multiple articles of manufacture at the same time is that even if the printer can be instructed, via the single image file that it receives, to print image content only on certain areas of the articles of manufacture on the pallet, the printing process generally results in at least some ink overspray (i.e., ink sprayed or splattered beyond the intended area of the printed image), which, depending on the placement of the image on the article of manufacture, can end up being applied to the pallet itself. When ink is deposited on the pallet, the ink can be transferred to subsequent sets of articles of manufacture loaded onto the pallet, either as wet ink or ink dust. This unintentionally transferred ink or ink dust can render flaws on subsequent articles of manufacture printed on the pallet.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have available techniques for printing multiple articles of manufacture on a printer that prints one image at a time that also minimizes the aforementioned problems.